redesign 2010

like watching grass grow

redesign 2010

like watching grass grow

I've been running this blog for a good 2.5 years now. It served me well and I love it to bits, but in all honesty it could use a fresh lick of paint. So a couple of weeks ago I started to experiment, trying to come up with a design that would still feel very much like Onderhond, but at the same time could manage to break free of the style I've been using ever since I started this blog. Here's what I've come up with.

welcome css3

I'm not a designer, by far. Give me a white PhotoShop sheet and rushes of cold sweat are inevitable. The original design was created by a friend of mine but I felt it was time to try and stand on my own two feet. Rather than start up my graphical software, I turned to css3. Something I can at least understand.

At the same time, it proved a good exercise to get to know the flaws and limitations of css3. The (somewhat final) result is a design that's maybe a bit heavy on typical css3 graphical features, but still came out pretty much okay for a non-designer blogging for a more technical-oriented audience. Truth be told, I also got some professional advise and feedback along the way which was extremely helpful.

time-lapse iterative redesign!

Along the way I was pointed to one of the articles I wrote some time ago on iterative design. It gave me
an opening to make the whole redesign process a little easier to handle. The idea is to take a month or two for implementing the redesign. Live. On the blog. No test development server needed.

The design will be implemented little by little, one component at a time. I'm sure at some point this will clash with the current design I have, but that's not too big a deal. The orange warning message you see on top will cover that and will lead people to this article if they want to know more about the strange things they might be seeing. At the same time, I like the transparency of the redesign process it creates and it gives me immediate results rather than working against deadlines I'm not going to make anyway.

exciting times

So I hope you guys bear with me for a while. I'll try not to screw things up (too badly) while doing my redesign work and I'll try to keep the overall design at least decent, even when the visual design of components might clash from time to time. I also hope to rework some things under the hood (read: get some more html5 in there), which should be mostly invisible to you all.